Heat and Light (14 page)

There is a chorus of voices, a show of hands. The reporters are like eager schoolchildren. He calls on a pretty young woman at the back of the room.

“What is a small release?”

The lieutenant governor finds this question unsettling. His mustache and modish haircut were a hit with young voters. He's been
in office two and a half months. “We have no way of telling exactly how much radiation was released.”

“Then how do you know it's small?”

The state Department of Environmental Protection has supplied a nuclear engineer to answer such questions, a baby-faced man in a mustard-colored turtleneck. He wears notable sideburns, a hangdog look. “The utility sent investigators across the river, since the wind was blowing that way, to take a reading. They detected a small amount of radioactive iodine on the ground.”

He pronounces the word
iodin.

“Can you spell that?” a reporter calls.

“Io-DYNE!” a voice booms from the front row. It's the irritable voice of a man used to shouting; his wife is hard of hearing. “He means io-DYNE.”

The engineer continues. “They have been continually monitoring in both locations and they have determined that the levels are less than one millirem per hour.”

There is a general commotion. “One
what
per hour?”

The engineer is asked to spell it. The irritable man repeats after him:
m-i-l-l-i-r-e-m.

“Per what?” the irritable man barks.

“Per hour.”

“Per hour,” the irritable man repeats. “Well, what does that mean?”

The engineer gives the definition of
millirem.

A bearded reporter interrupts him. “The statement says there was a malfunction in the turbine system. What kind of a malfunction?”

“The plant was operating at a hundred percent power, and some fault in the—the nonsafety system, the turbine plant, caused the valves going to the turbine to shut.” The engineer is aware of his voice trembling. An hour ago he was riding in a National Guard
helicopter, a mile downwind of the plant. “This is a normal, anticipated transient.”

The irritable man spells the word
transient
.

A female reporter gets to her feet, the feisty one who scared off the lieutenant governor. “Well, how did the company discover the problem? Is there some kind of a system that alerts them?”

The engineer struggles visibly with this question. He thinks of the six thousand indicator lights in the control room, the seven hundred fifty alarms. He is ready to laugh or weep.

“They could tell from their instrumentation.” The absurdity of his own words nearly undoes him. He tries again. “Well, the plant is designed to withstand this particular transient.”

At the back of the room—he is sure of it—reporters are beginning to laugh.

Male reporter: “It sounds like you rely heavily on the instruments and reports from the utility company. Is there any reason why we should doubt the credibility of that?”

The engineer admits that no one has verified the company's data.

“So you're just taking what they tell you?” says the feisty woman.

“Yes.”

In the front row the irritable man lights a pipe. He sucks vigorously to get the thing going, three hearty puffs of smoke.

The room gets louder and louder. A few reporters still shout out questions but most have lost interest in the engineer, now speaking through a cloud of smoke. He explains again what the turbine does, what the relief valves do, but no one is listening. He wishes someone would knock him unconscious.

Finally a reporter asks a question he can answer.

“No, I haven't seen the movie,” he says.

ALL DAY LONG,
civil defense trucks roll through the neighborhoods. The trucks are impressive, military-issue. They seem built for some strategic purpose, attack or rescue, the distribution of vital supplies
or arms. Today they simply make announcements:
A state of emergency has been declared on Three Mile Island
.
Please stay indoors with your windows closed.

To the boy Wesley Peacock, it seems an arbitrary request. “Why can't we open the windows?”

“Air pollution,” his mother calls back. She is sitting at the kitchen table with their neighbor Audrey Hershberger. In the living room Wesley plays Mousetrap with Audrey's daughter. Wesley is the green mouse. Jessie is the red.

“Hydrogen is flammable,” says Audrey. “If the bubble keeps growing there could be an explosion.”

Bernadette cuts two more slices of cinnamon cake. They've each eaten a slice already, talking about the bubble. It's been a struggle to keep Wesley away from the television. She was relieved when Audrey and Jessie showed up at the door.

“We saw the movie,” says Audrey. “Bern, aren't you curious?”

“A little,” she admits. “But Gene would never. He says everybody should simmer down.”

Audrey takes the smaller piece of cake. “Like I need this. Ned says I'm big as a bus. Oh, so guess who else is expecting? Bonnie Hoover.”

Bernadette thinks, Again?

“Pregnant,” she says softly. “Are you sure?” Honestly, how is it possible? Bernadette is grateful as a beggar for her one child. Bonnie Hoover is her own age, and already on number four.

“Keeping the windows closed,” says Audrey. “What good is that going to do?”

Ralph and Bonnie Hoover must be at it all the time.

In the living room Wesley rolls the die. He and Jessie are in the thick of the game, the trap built halfway. He snaps the plastic gutter into place.

“It's not pollution,” says Jessie. “It's radiation. They told us in school.”

She is a quiet pretty girl, dark-haired. She and Wesley are summertime friends. From Memorial Day to Labor Day they are inseparable. Then, each September, Jessie disappears into school and dance lessons, weekend sleepovers with girls Wesley doesn't want to know. Girls in groups make him nervous. He is happiest—in fact, completely happy—with Jessie alone.

In the kitchen the mothers finish their coffee. “Are the windows made of lead?” says Audrey. “Because lead is the only thing that stops radiation. We need to get home and finish packing. Ned wants to hit the road at four.”

When the guests have gone, Wesley sits at the kitchen table with his phonics workbook. Bernadette takes pork chops from the freezer. A crazy person pounds at the front door.

Bernadette rises to answer it. Her neighbor Digger Farrell stands on the porch, wild-eyed and red-faced. She can smell the liquor on his breath.

“What are you doing here?” Digger shouts. “I thought for sure Gene would of got you out.”

“Oh, no. We're fine right here.”

“What do you mean? Didn't you hear? Preschool children.”

Bernadette flushes. Wesley is small for his age, but not that small. “Oh, no. Wesley is school age.”

“Then how come he don't go to school?” To her relief Digger doesn't wait for an answer. “We're loading up the truck right now. There's room for you both. We're heading down to Kentucky to Marla's parents'.”

Bernadette lowers her voice and hopes Digger will do the same. “Digger, that's kind of you. We're going to stay put for now. We can go later, if we need to.”

Digger looks dumbstruck. “What if you can't get on the highway? If they put up barriers on the entrance ramps? I got guns and a chain saw. I can get through if I have to. But what are you going to do?”

“That's kind of you, but we're going to sit tight for now,” she says, almost whispering. “I appreciate the concern.”

Firmly she closes the door.

THE A&P IS EERILY DESERTED.
Bernadette pushes her cart up and down the aisles. It's like shopping in wartime, the shelves empty of bread, sugar, candles, canned peas and corn. The Maxwell House coffee is gone, so she settles for a can of Folgers. She looks for items that don't require cooking or refrigeration, as instructed by the radio, and leaves with a strange assortment: beef jerky, a box of doughnuts, jarred sauerkraut and beets.

Gene says Folgers tastes burnt.

That night the family eats dinner in silence, knives and forks loud on the plate. “Don't you think they would tell us?” says Gene.

“They
are
telling us. It's all over the radio.”

“They're saying preschool children. He's not preschool. Preschool and pregnant women.”

Bernadette punished—again—for failing to be pregnant.

“Well, does that make sense to you? How is it bad for them and not for us?”

Wesley ignores his pork chop but eats his green beans as a concession. Without enthusiasm he asks to be excused. He is expected to play outdoors after dinner. He takes his jacket from its peg near the door with an air of weary resignation, like a miner heading underground.

“Not tonight, sweetie,” says his mother. “Go in your room and play your game.”

Last year on his birthday, his mother let him watch a movie on television,
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.
The boy, played by John Travolta, had no immune system. He couldn't live in a world full of germs, so he stayed in a plastic oxygen tent inside his bedroom. To Wesley it is the greatest life imaginable.

He rolls the die for green and assembles the staircase.

The bubble had a TV and stereo, like the boy's own groovy apartment. Inside it he wore funny hats and raised hamsters and even danced (disco moves John Travolta later made famous in
Saturday Night Fever,
a film Wesley wasn't allowed to see).

You know,
the Bubble Boy told his doctor,
I'm not so unhappy in here as all of you think.

To Wesley it was a thrilling notion. The words rang in his ears like a manifesto, a singing affirmation that he was not wrong.

The blue mouse lands on the space marked
GO TO CHEESE
—a wasted opportunity for the green mouse, since the trap is only half-built. He rolls the die for green and attaches the shoe to the lamppost. Then he rolls the die for blue. Radiation is worse if the wind blows it at you, according to Jessie's teacher. Those people, the downwinders, will die in a matter of weeks. Everybody else will get cancer, which takes a while.

He wonders why anyone wants to go to school.

IN TOWN THE REPORTERS KEEP COMING.
Teams arrive from France, England, Japan, West Germany. It's a kind of disaster Olympics. They set up camp in roadside motels.

Protestors arrive by the busload. It's a Thursday morning, a workday; yet hundreds of long-haired people have nothing better to do. “It goes to show you,” the feed salesman tells his customers. “Idleness is the devil's workshop.” On the sidewalk in front of the dime store, braless college girls offer him bumper stickers. A man in braids hands out pamphlets from his truck.
NO NUKES NEVER AGAIN
. The salesman understands that the world has gone mental, his wife included. Bernadette is a high-strung woman, prone to upsets. He is grateful to be at work.

The salesman himself is a model of industry. He gets an early start and skips his lunch break, eats a sandwich listening to the radio in his car. After the radioactive iodine was detected in Golds
boro, the county agricultural extension issued a directive. The AM stations repeat it on the half hour:
all livestock should be on stored feed until further notice.

He sells more feed in a day than he has in six months.

FRIDAY THE SUN RISES
as though nothing unusual has happened. The stock price of Columbia Pictures rises 8 percent. Every few hours someone holds a press conference.

The uranium core was never uncovered. Dauphin County will not be evacuated.

Children are to stay indoors.

The core was uncovered for several minutes. For several hours. For an undetermined period. People of all ages should stay indoors until midnight. A quarter of the fuel rods have melted, but this is no cause for alarm.

Radiation has been confined to the reactor building. To Unit
Two only. Radiation has been confined to the island. Forty thousand gallons of radioactive water have been released to the river, but this poses no danger to public health.

A small pocket of hydrogen has been detected in the reactor, a harmless bubble. Evacuation is unnecessary at this time.

Sixty percent of the fuel rods are damaged. Schools are closed until further notice. Pregnant women and preschool children should leave the area. Please note that this is not an evacuation. There is no Chinese syndrome.

The hydrogen bubble appears to be growing.

Residents are asked to remain calm.

I
n the Dairy Queen two radios are playing. The one out front is for the customers, a hushed male voice Mack recognizes:
A warm wind's blowing, the stars are out, and I'd really love to see you tonight.
Standing at the counter, it's just possible to hear the second radio, or maybe it's a television, playing in the kitchen. A newscaster is speaking, a grave male voice:
Federal regulators descended on Harrisburg today to assess the ongoing situation at Three Mile Island.

“You're back,” says the girl behind the counter. She wears a red uniform and visor and a plastic name tag:
HOW MAY I HELP YOU? RENA
. “My first customer of the day.”

“I get hungry early. I can't help it.” Flushing, stammering, Mack orders the same lunch as last time: two double burgers with bacon, large fries, vanilla milk shake. Rena writes the order on a pad. Her penmanship is neat, her hand small as a child's.

The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency has reported a new, uncontrolled release of radiation.

Rena stands very still, listening.

“You're not worried about that, are you?” says Mack.

“There's a bubble.” Rena tears the sheet off her order pad and clips it to a metal carousel on the counter behind her. “We're downwinders. Well, maybe. It depends on which way the wind blows. It was on the news.”

The radio voice returns.
In a press conference today, the governor urged residents to stay calm.

Rena snorts. “Wow, that's so helpful. Thank God for the governor. How else would we know what to do in a nuclear meltdown? To stay calm.” Rena punches numbers into the cash register. “Calm, my ass.”

Her ass is curved and impossibly compact, like two halves of a cantaloupe. It makes Mack wonder about the rest of her, knees shoulders thighs breasts, the matched parts small and rounded and perfectly formed.

Mack hands her four dollars. “I remember you from high school. I was two years behind you. You had a boyfriend, Ted or Fred or something.”

Rena hands back two dimes and says, “Freddy Weems.”

“My hair was longer then. I played basketball,” Mack adds stupidly, as though the two facts are related. “It's okay if you don't remember. You don't look too busy. Come sit with me while I eat.”

“We're not supposed to do that.” Rena glances over her shoulder. “Maybe for a minute, though.”

They choose one of the two booths. The indoor seating is a recent addition. The Dairy Queen started out as a summer joint, a roadside custard stand with a patio and a few picnic tables out front. Mack unwraps the cheeseburgers and set the fries in the middle of the table. “Have some.”

“I'd be big as a house if I ate like that.”

“I burn it off,” says Mack, who is big but not as big as a house and, anyway, has never wanted to be small. “I've been up working since five o'clock. Have some.”

“Five in the
morning
? Geez Louise. Where do you work?”

“My dad's farm. For now,” Mack adds hastily. “I'm home from college. It's spring break.”

Rena shakes out a dollop of ketchup. “College. Do you like it?”

A silence in which Mack considers what to say about college. The truth seems too complicated: that college crushes and then remakes you. That it's where your life actually begins.

Rena doesn't wait for an answer. “I almost went. I saved money and everything. But it's hard with a kid.”

“You have a kid?”

Rena shakes out a dollop of ketchup. Already she's made serious inroads into the pile of fries. “He's four now. I don't regret it, but you can't do everything.”

A sudden draft as a customer comes in the front door—Rocco Bernardi, the town undertaker. The DQ is a half mile from the cemetery. A few times a week Rocco comes in for lunch.

“I should go. I have a customer.”

“All right.” Mack slides the paper boat across the table. “That one's yours.”

“I can't eat your last one.”

“Bet you can.”

Rena pops the French fry into her mouth.

MACK TAKES THE LONG WAY OUT OF TOWN,
Susquehanna Avenue to Drake Highway to the Dutch Road, the curving cow path that leads to the farm. The lane is sloppy, slick with spring mud. She stops to check the mailbox, which is empty. Eight months ago, she got a letter from Liz Harvey, a woman with pretty handwriting. When Mack realized who the sender was, she tore up the letter and threw it in the trash. Later she regretted this. Now she checks the mailbox every day, but a second letter has never come.

When Mack knew her, her mother was called Betty. Mack never heard the name of the man she ran off with. He drove a lemon-yellow Chevy stately as an ocean liner, full bodied and extravagantly finned. Mack remembers watching it from the porch swing. Given the chronology of events, she must have been five years old.

When she and her mother got into the car, the man looked displeased.
What did you bring her for?
He wore a stiff new shirt fresh out of the package, his hair backcombed with some fragrant pomade. He looked like a cowboy who'd cleaned up for church.

What else was I going to do with her?

They drove with the windows down, the high winding road that led to Garman Lake, where Mack was told to get out and play. The adults sat in the car watching her like a drive-in movie. When she got back in the car her mother had been crying.

By the end of summer—it might have been a week later, or a month—her mother was gone.

Mack closes the empty mailbox and continues up the lane. Pop is coming out of the barn, favoring his left leg, his step heavy and lurching—a tall man still, despite his stoop.

“Susan!” he shouts. “I been looking for you.”

No one else calls her this.

Mack rolls down the window. “Sorry, Pop. I stopped to get some lunch.”

“My work light crapped out. I can't get up there to change it.” It pains him to say it, pains his daughter to hear it. Her entire happy childhood was built on the myth of his omnipotence.

She follows him into the barn, where a ladder is waiting. Beneath the dark work lamp, a small motor lies in pieces. She shimmies up the ladder and replaces the bulb.

Her childhood was happy. Pete didn't know how to raise a girl, never having been one or understood or liked them much, so he raised her as a boy. He wanted a son, and Susan, by glad coincidence, wanted to be one.

When she comes down he's already bent over the engine. He's still good with his hands. He doesn't thank her and she doesn't expect him to. It was only a lightbulb.

“See you later, Pop.”

He grunts in assent, glad to be about his business. Life is filled, increasingly, with these piss-ant frustrations. He's always been a capable man, impatient with those less shiningly competent, a category that once included everyone he knew. But age has diminished him, sixty years of farmwork, arthritis in his knees, hips, and back.
That the great Pete Mackey can no longer change a lightbulb is a truth too awful to mention. A hired hand—a younger, stronger man to witness his failures—is a humiliation he will not tolerate. Only his daughter can help him in a way that doesn't shame him. She divines his wishes without being asked.

He offers her a pinch of snuff.

Susan needs no instructions, accepts no payment, expects no gratitude. She allows him the illusion that he did it all himself.

THE FARM CALLS HER,
the farm needs her. Pop is glad to have her back. This should have settled the matter, and it does, mainly. Only rarely does Mack remember college, a period in her life that now seems imaginary, like something she once dreamed.

She left Penn State a year ago. What she told the Dairy Queen girl was slightly true, that one part of it: her departure coincided with spring break. The timing shocked her coach, her teammates. Track and field was a spring sport, their season just about to begin.

The women's team had been, for fifty years, a quiet intramural program, noticed by no one. Then came Title Nine, a flood of federal dollars, and suddenly they were a varsity sport. Coaches brought over from the men's side were asked to do the impossible. Female bodies weren't designed for throwing the javelin, a point the coaches agreed on. Female bodies were designed for a purpose they did not mention, though it was always on their minds.

Mack was Coach's personal discovery. He'd spotted her in the gym one morning, a rising freshman in the summer basketball camp. The sport, she told him, didn't interest her. Football would have been her pick. In junior high she'd been an unstoppable running back, the first and last girl in Bakerton history to play on the boys' team. At nineteen she was still fast, despite her size. In stocking feet she was Coach's height. Her morning weight was two hundred pounds. Had she been a boy, someone would have seen that she was a born thrower: the titanic thighs and shoulders, the instinctual
rhythm and grace. Coach let her try all the throws, but her destiny was obvious the instant she held the shot.

Of course she'd watched Bruce Jenner win the decathlon. Everybody had. Now the unthinkable had become thinkable and so Mack thought it:
That could be me.

Track and field lived together, ate together, trained together. On weekends they drank together. It was alcohol that caused the disaster, unleashing a series of events.

There was a problem about a girl.

A day later Mack was on a bus back to Bakerton. Now she hasn't picked up the shot in more than a year, though she throws it nearly every night, in dreams.

A YEAR PASSES QUICKLY ON A FARM.
From dawn till supper, Mack's days are packed with chores. Winter was hard on the fences. All day Saturday, Pop unrolls lengths of chicken wire. Thinking of the Dairy Queen girl, Mack hammers in the posts as lunchtime comes and goes.

The DQ is closed on Sundays.

On Monday she is waiting in the parking lot at 10:50. She's been hungry all morning, woke up hungry, as though she hasn't eaten in days.

At eleven the neon sign illuminates:
OPEN
. Mack gets out of her truck. Inside, the place is empty except for a small blond-haired boy. He sits in one of the booths, hunched over a picture book.

“Hiya,” Mack says.

The boy doesn't answer, which is fine. Mack treats children like live grenades. When she was fifteen and sensitive, a distant cousin had visited the farm at Christmas, bringing her small daughter. The child studied Mack openly, glaring as if displeased.
Are you a boy or a girl?

Mack is recalling this when Rena comes out of the kitchen. “You're still here. I figured you'd be back at college by now.”

Mack gropes for words. She considers and rejects
What happened to your eye?
Because, really, only one thing could have happened to Rena's eye.

“Are you all right?” she says instead.

Rena's hand goes to her eye and then away, as though she's been instructed not to touch it. “It's nothing.”

The bruise is clearly visible through her makeup—new, but not brand-new. It's had some time to blossom, a day anyway, to reach its full purple.

“Is that your boy?” Mack says.

“I had to bring him with me. I'm not supposed to. He usually goes to his gram's. But under the circumstances.”

“Your mom?”

“His other gram. Freddy's mom. So, you know, awkward.” Again her hand goes to her eye. Finally she takes the order pad from her pocket. “Two bacon doubles, large fry, large shake?”

“Yeah.” Mack looks at the wall clock—11:02—and reads the signs:
A DILLY OF A BAR!
HOT AND JUICY BRAZIER
.
She studies the tile floor, the soft-serve machine behind the counter, the three sizes of paper cups stacked in towers, small medium large. Having run out of things to look at, she allows herself another glance at Rena's eye.

“Have a seat,” says Rena. “I'll bring it out to you.”

Because she is supposed to, Mack sits at the table across from the boy, now writing in his book with a green pencil. “What's your name?” she says.

The boy doesn't answer. He puts down the green pencil and picks up a blue one. Mack wonders if he's hard of hearing.

Rena comes to the table with a paper sack, Mack's lunch wrapped and ready. She sits gingerly, making Mack wonder what was done to the rest of her body. The black eye is the only damage you can see.

“Calvin,” Rena says to the boy. “You shouldn't write in your book.”

The boy shrugs. Except for his hair, which is wispy and blond, he is the image of his mother: the pointed chin, the Cupid's-bow mouth.

Mack feels compelled to say something. “What are you reading?”

Rena leans over the boy's shoulder, pointing to words on the page. In a clear childish voice Calvin reads:
“This is the dog who scared the cat who chased the rat who ate the malt who lived in the house that Jack built.”

“You should eat,” says Rena. “It isn't good cold.”

Mack unwraps her hamburgers, the boy's eyes following her. “Can he have some French fries?”

Calvin looks up at Rena.

“Go wash your hands,” she says, and slides over so the boy can wriggle out of the booth. “He's shy with strangers.”

“Who did this to you?”

Rena ignores the question. “Calvin was in bed when it happened. But nobody could have slept through that.” She takes the blue pencil and draws in the boy's book, a detailed butterfly. “Here's what's crazy: he's pretending like he doesn't notice. He wakes up and his mom has a black eye and he doesn't even ask.”

“Did you call the cops?”

“They don't do anything.”

Don't,
not
didn't.
As though this were a regular occurrence, the sort of thing that happened from time to time.

They watch the boy come out of the restroom.